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Holy Spirit disruptions: Choosing disruption through spiritual practices

Lynne Baab • Wednesday August 11 2021

I got to preach ten days ago at our church in Seattle. (The whole service is recorded here.) When the senior minister contacted me about a month ago to ask me to preach, he told me the assigned passage for August 1 was Jesus with the children (Luke 18:15-17). Because I’ve been writing blog posts for two months about Holy Spirit disruptions, I immediately thought about the ways Jesus disrupted things in that incident. The passage is clear that he disrupted the disciples’ priorities on who should be welcomed into Jesus’ presence, but he also gave a fresh, radical, and enigmatic perspective...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: Ignite holy fire

Lynne Baab • Friday July 30 2021

In the West of the United States these hot summer days, fire is terrifying. Here in Seattle, the winds have blown from the west for several weeks, so the smoke from the fires in Eastern Washington is blowing away from us. My friend in the Minneapolis area, however, is dealing with the kind of smoke that we’ve had many recent summers in Seattle, and that we will have when the wind changes. The smoke around Minneapolis, my friend tells me, is coming from fires in Canada to the northwest of them.

Yet despite its enormous destructive power, fire as a tool shaped...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: Go/Wait

Lynne Baab • Friday July 16 2021

The Bible and Christian history are full of stories of God telling people to go somewhere. The command to wait is quite frequent, too. God’s word to us to go, as well as God’s instructions to wait, often come to us as a disruption.

Elizabeth Elliot (1926-2015) was a hero of mine when I was a young Christian. Early in my twenties, I heard her speak, and I was captivated by her description of the obedience that took her first husband, Jim Elliot (1927-1956), to a South American tribe to share the Gospel. Instead of becoming Christians, the people there killed him and...

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Holy Spirit disruptions: What if something being hard shows we’re doing it right?

Lynne Baab • Friday July 9 2021

The sermon at our church last Sunday focused on Jesus’ sending of the 12, two by two, to preach the Gospel, heal, and cast out demons (Mark 6:1-13). Our preacher talked about the opposition that Jesus encountered in Nazareth right before he sent out the disciples, an incident that prepared the disciples for their ministry. Our preacher mentioned that when we experience opposition, we so often think we have done something wrong.

That idea has been a big theme in my pondering for the past few weeks. In my family of origin, when something was hard, it meant that you were doing...

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